Rodger Shanahan

Dr Rodger Shanahan is a non-resident Fellow at the Lowy Institute of International Policy and a visiting fellow at the National Security College, ANU. He is also a part-time member on the Refugee Review Tribunal. A former Army officer with extensive service in the Parachute Battalion Group (PBG), he served with the UN in South Lebanon and Syria, with the PBG in East Timor in 1999, as the military liaison officer in Beirut during the 2006 war and in Afghanistan. He has also served in the Australian embassies in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.Dr Shanahan has MAs in International Relations and Middle East and Central Asian Studies from the ANU, and a PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Sydney.

Iranian nuclear negotiations may soon provide a solution to a long-term security problem, but the second-order effects could actually be more challenging than the issue they addressed in the first place.

The attack on the Charlie Hebdo office brings into focus Australia's hypocrisy of advocating free speech as a fundamental right and yet its failure to criticise Middle Eastern allies who do not see it that way.

As short-sighted and exclusionary as the Iraq government's policies have been, they are not responsible for either the creation of ISIS or its sustainment. That has its roots in a broader sectarian conflict.

So long as western interests in Yemen are largely defined by security then a new political system will be dictated to more by Saudi Arabia’s counter-reformist political ideology than the west’s desire for political liberalism.